Hi,
I'm Trevor Lewis,
Author of Thriving as an Empath,
Empowering Your Highly Sensitive Self.
I've been an empath all my life and since 2013 I've been on a mission to help other empaths learn more easily the lessons I had to learn the hard way.
This talk addresses the most important lesson for any struggling empath to understand.
That many of the emotions you are feeling are simply not yours.
And the way to find out whether they are yours or not is to ask,
Is it mine?
Right now you may be thinking,
What do you mean,
Is it mine?
If I'm feeling it,
It must be mine,
Right?
Well yes and no.
The mainstream world we live in believes that if we are feeling an emotion it must be ours and that if we don't like the way we feel we must fix ourselves to feel better.
As empaths we know that we pick up energy from other people and yet we buy into the mainstream view that the emotions we feel must be ours.
And when we do that they do indeed become ours.
The way to stop taking on other people's emotions as our own is to ask,
Is this mine?
My clearest example comes from my early experiences in my healing practice.
One day I sat down to do remote work for a client and as I sat down at my desk I started thinking about a customer service issue I was having with my local cable company.
And within a few seconds got to thinking,
This client is going to have to wait,
I need to write another email to the cable company.
As I had that thought I realized the anger wasn't mine.
I had tuned into my client and had started processing his anger.
In doing so my mind immediately went to justifying why I was feeling angry and hence the issue with the cable company.
Was I angry with the cable company?
Yes,
But in that moment the anger I was actually processing was triggered by me tuning into my client.
Adding that allowed me to release my attachment to the emotion,
To focus on clearing my client and later to deal with the cable company at the proper time.
Notice how tricky the mind can be.
The job of the mind is to create labels,
Stories and meanings behind what we are experiencing in the world.
When I first started feeling the anger the first thing on my mind was to come up with reasons why I was feeling the anger and latched onto the cable company as that reason.
After spending all of my life being socialized into the mainstream way of thinking it takes practice to remember that the way our emotional bodies process other people's emotions.
Often just asking the question is it mine can be enough to realize that the answer is no and for the emotion to dissolve.
Sometimes more work is required.
If you can work out who you are processing it's useful to run the light projector exercise for them and that can be enough to shift the energy.
The light projector exercise is the topic of another talk in this series.
Now some of you are asking how do I get an answer to is it mine?
Why do I determine who the emotion belongs to?
If I don't get an immediate intuitive answer or if I don't trust my intuition then what?
The tools I personally use are either a pendulum or muscle testing.
These are both great tools for getting yes no answers to specific questions.
Their value is in bypassing the intellect and so enabling you to tap into the wisdom of your own body.
Our mind doesn't always give us accurate information.
Our body always does.
But using tools to help our intuition is a topic for another talk.
There's much more to be said on that topic.
Before I finish here I'm going to add a footnote.
Some empaths I've met don't even bother asking is it mine at all.
They take a different approach of just feeling the emotion whether it's their own or not and just allowing the emotion to flow through their body.
The principle of non-attachment allows the emotion to be just that.
E-motion.
Energy emotion.
By just allowing the emotion to flow through they can release the feeling and move on with their lives.
Thank you for listening to this talk.
Thank you for helping yourself learn to become a thriving empath.
